Watch six minute excerpt from Seven Bridges (first bridge)
Watch entire work, peripatetikos 3. Seven Bridges (Kant)
Seven Bridges (Kant) is part of a series of experimental videos and installation works devoted to sites of thinking and walking in the history of philosophy. Immanuel Kant led a life famously ordered by chronology; locals referred to him as the “Königsberg clock.” One invariable daily ritual was an hour’s walk that began precisely each day at 3pm. (The ritual was broken only once when Kant rushed out to buy an early printing of Rousseau’s Emile.)
My first ideas about sites of thinking immediately turned to Kant. However, the Prussian city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia) was severely bombarded by the British in WWII and then overrun by the Red Army and the city transformed by reconstruction in Soviet times. Even though the effacement of sites of thinking is an important element of the entire series, it seemed unlikely that I would be able to gather useful material in Kaliningrad, and another artist, Joachim Koester, had already undertaken a similar project. Works devoted to Heidegger, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein (all in planning stages), the Stoics and Plato’s Phaedrus (both concluded) all seemed more practicable.
Then, in 2018 I had the pleasure of viewing Philippe Colin’s lovely film from 1996, Les dernières jours d’Emmanuel Kant, inspired by the Thomas de Quincey essay of the same name. The film features David Warrilow, one of the great interpreters of Samuel Becket, as Kant at the end of his life, and unsurprisingly, there are many sequences of Kant walking and thinking.
There is a scene that appears late in Les dernières jours d’Emmanuel Kant where Kant is seated at table with his friend, Wasianski, Kant’s sister, and her young adult son. The conversation is animated but Kant himself seems absent as if now fully withdrawn into his dotage. Suddenly, he reaches for two slices of cold cuts, places them side-by-side on the table, and then carefully arranges seven string beans around and across the thin slices of meat. One fears, perhaps along with his family, that Kant has finally become non compos mentis. Then Kant cheerfully asks his nephew, “Young man, are you familiar with the mystery of the seven bridges of Königsberg?” Königsberg is bisected by the Pregel River, which includes two large islands, Kneiphof and Lomse, that in Kant’s time were connected to each other and to the mainland districts of the city by seven bridges. The problem that Kant poses to his nephew is to imagine a walk that crosses each of those bridges once and only once. The task proves to be confounding. Indeed, in 1736 the great mathematician Leonhard Euler offered an important proof that the puzzle could not be solved; nevertheless, his negative solution laid the foundations of graph theory and anticipated many important aspects of modern topology.
For my work, Seven Bridges (Kant), I extract seven fragments from Colin’s film, further refining them and altering sound and rhythm in subtle ways. These fragments are then systematically shuffled and reordered according to a protocol derived from Euler’s negative solution to the seven bridges problem. In the resulting work, the fragments of Kant’s chronology—the clock generated in his routines and rhythms—are pulled apart and reassembled into seven de-chronologized variations of these elemental actions that in turn produce surprising micro-narratives with shifting affects. In particular, the Beckettian humor embodied in Warrilow’s subtle yet precise performance is brought forward through unexpected repetitions and juxtapositions. Still, in spite of this radical disordering of time, with its repetitions, recursions, and retrogressions, Kant arrives at his predetermined end, and so must we all.
Seven Bridges (Kant) may be exhibited as a single screen theatrical projection or as a loop in a gallery setting. A future installation version may separate the seven sequences into individual screens accompanied by illustrations of Euler’s proofs, cartographic reproductions of Königsberg in the late 18th century, and seven print images derived from Colin’s film reproduced as charcoal drawings. (See mock-up images below.)
peripatetikos 3. Seven Bridges (Kant) previewed at the gallery Campagne Première on 6 June 2019. The work is available for rental from Light Cone.
Map of Königsberg in the 16th century
